“I’m kind of bummed that she wanted to buy back her vocal tracks, but it’s her decision. She said that you were going to be looking out for her interests, like I have something to worry about.”

“That’s just something I told her to say. She was all worried that you’d freak out and get angry.”

John was angry, but not in a way that he might consider violence against another person. He wanted to throw his computers off the balcony into the ship canal, or just drop them onto the parking lot thirty feet below. The sound of smashing plastic and silicon might just make him feel better.

“I’m not angry, plus do you think I’d ever try to hurt someone, even if they didn’t know you?”

“Probably not, you seem pretty mellow. Like I said, she was just worried.”

“You tell Roxy that she has nothing to worry about. I might take a baseball bat to my computer, but never to a pretty girl”, John said reachign for another piece of pizza.

Randy had come bringing something else besides John’s favorite pizza. He knew quite a few people at Microsoft, and was still in the loop when it came to software that wasn’t ready for prime time or maybe would never see the light of day. Randy had a DVD in his jacket that was going point John in a whole new direction in his search for artificial intelligence.

Microsoft was so entrenched in the market for computer operating systems that it was like they had a license to print money. Almost every PC manufacturer put a copy of Windows on each machine that went out the door, and all those Microsoft products no longer had boxes or manuals or shrink wrap any more. The digital copies of Windows were just copied onto the hard drives and a little holographic sticker went on the case, showing that the computer had a registered copy of Windows on it.

So the company churned on, streaming out these serial numbers and holographic stickers, raking in the dough, but they had to find something to spend research money on. Programmers and engineers need to be kept busy, honing their skills for the time when the next version of Windows would be needed to bolster the revenue stream and make the end users even happier with their computers. At least that was how it was supposed to work.

Some of the engineers and programmers still got bored, even with xbox 360 and the zune and the web applications. When the smartest ones started to exhibit the telltale signs of ADHD or Asberger’s, they would be given something to copy, clone or reverse-engineer. Sometimes a product would emerge, and sometimes it would just be a dead end in bloatware, but it was always a technological challenge that helped those programmers flex their coding muscles.

Randy was once the group leader of the group that got to write the specs that would get the reverse engineering ball rolling. Someone had to put down on paper all the things that something did, or was supposed to do, so that someone else could recreate it from scratch. When you set out to copy something that someone else is likely to try to protect you from copying, you had to have some ground rules to keep you out of court.

Whether it was a copyright, a trademark or a patent, the guys that would create your version had to keep their grubby hands and prying eyes off the original. Those that wrote the specs would never work the recreation, and would try to keep the next team from ever seeing the competition’s prize. The goal was, of course, to make money selling something that was just a little bit better, or little cheaper than the one that everyone was already buying to put under the christmas tree or on the corporate charge card.

When Windows was flying high, Randy’s team had a lot spare time, so he had written some pretty strange specifications, and a few of those had actually been passed down the line. One that had received some technical attention was on the DVD in his pocket. The spec he had written was for a talking dog, not that anyone buy Randy would know that. When the program had gotten to a certain point, it really started freaking some of the programmers out and they pulled the plug on the project.

Randy held up his finger as he was trying to separate an olive pit from the edible portion of the pizza in his mouth, “I’ve got something to show you.”

Rancy pulled the DVD out of his pocket and put it on the coffee table. It was in a purple jewel case and it was just a cheap recordable DVD that he had burned the data onto. John reached over and picked it up. The top of the DVD was blank except for a ring of very small letters that were etched around the center spindle hole.

“I can’t quite read what it says”, John said to Randy as he twisted the disc around, trying to catch the light.

“It says, El Cerebro.”

“The Brain?”

“The name was a joke that we used when the program started doing things that were never specified. The original name was Irish Rover, which was another joke. You know how funny all us computer geeks are”, Randy said, laughing.

“What is it?”

Randy didn’t want to give John any preconceived notions about the program, so he had to think of a careful answer, “It’s a game, or a joke, maybe.”

“Is this something from your time in Redmond?”, John asked, opening the case to look at the disc.

“Can’t say.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Whatever works for you, man.”